Alice Asks the Big Questions

by Laurent Gounelle

  “The only reason it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it was nailed there.”

  Alice took a deep breath. There must be a way without going so far as to meditate two hours a day.

  After all, she did feel she had evolved somewhat over the past few years, without having done any specific work on her ego—whose existence she had been unaware of—simply by developing her self-esteem and confidence in herself and others. In the past, she recalled, she was much more reactive to other people’s gibes. It was almost as though by learning to love herself, she had naturally lost some of her ego. That seemed paradoxical, of course. But what if an excess of ego and a lack of self-esteem were two sides of the same coin? In the end, perhaps people who strongly identified with their egos, who were bigheaded or very arrogant, were, deep down, actually insecure?

  Alice sensed that continuing to develop confidence in herself, reassuring herself about her true value, would help her react less strongly to attacks and keep her own ego in check. And if other people’s arrogance was caused by hidden suffering, wouldn’t compassion toward them perhaps be more appropriate than reacting to them?

  “’E’s passed on! This parrot is no more!”

  If only I could manage to dampen my ego, Alice thought, to break my ties to it, free myself from it, I’d be happy, even proud to have managed it…Proud? Proud? But who would be proud? My…ego? Help! My ego is trying to take over my new identity as someone seeking a higher spiritual level—just like the character in the cartoon by Voutch!

  So, then…how could it work?

  “Well, I’d better replace it, then.”

  20

  Monday evening.

  “Alice, you don’t look well.”

  “No, no, everything’s all right. I’m just a little tired.”

  In truth, the legal conversations going on at this dinner party given by one of Paul’s colleagues, who was also married to a lawyer, bored her to tears, so she was taking refuge in her thoughts. And what a ridiculous idea to have accepted an invitation on a Monday evening! Now she would be exhausted for the rest of the week.

  She had a sip of champagne and took a little cake from a platter.

  In the corner of the living room, one of the couple’s children was watching television, stretched out on an ottoman that was bigger than him. A commercial for a men’s cologne promised to transform the viewer into an irresistible superhero. Alice smiled.

  The ego was such an easy lever to pull. The admen knew how to play the game. What better way to sell something than to encourage us to form a flattering image of ourselves? The simple mention of such and such product reinforced the false identity that we thought was the real us, that we thought increased our worth in others’ eyes, and this made the product irresistible. The virus named “desire” had burrowed its way into our minds and would never let go until we gave in to it. And that was how money, the servant of our desires, gradually became our master, our God.

  Everyone suffered from ego, their own and other people’s. And today, nothing enticed us to free ourselves from it. Quite the opposite: society as a whole encouraged us to have an inflated ego, because our economic system depended on it.

  The TV commercial was over and an interview with a politician came on. In the past, Alice had been fascinated by political debates, where everyone sincerely championed their view of society. Today, everyone championed their career, their campaign, their personal interests. Of course, not everyone could be Jaurès or de Gaulle, but still.

  Alice caught a few bits of the exchanges. Even the journalist was less interested in how to solve society’s problems than in the political game itself. Most of the questions dealt with the man’s career strategies or the way he might succeed, or not, in taking power.

  Alice thought that even the left-right divide was a result of and maintained by man’s ego, the ego that needs to split things apart, to create opposing camps, to feel its importance to its own camp and especially against its opponent. Besides, politicians of all stripes knew this very well: to close ranks and lure voters to the polls, all they had to do was raise the specter of the other side, cry wolf, and everyone would happily fall in line without even thinking about it. The left-right divide was a powerful democratic anesthetic.

  The little boy’s eyes seemed glued to the television, even though he probably didn’t understand much.

  In another corner of the living room, the couple’s teenager was engrossed in a game of air hockey against his older brother. He must have had a lot of practice because his reflexes were amazing.

  Alice nibbled on her cake and watched them.

  Spiritual exploration was not her specialty and she felt helpless, a feeling she resented. Her long experience in personal development had taught her something: you had to remain confident in any situation. Being confident allowed you to access your skills, which you needed to find solutions to problems. Despondency was deadly.

  The teenager was skillfully using his air hockey paddle to push the puck to the opposite side and counter his brother’s maneuvers. The puck was moving at incredible speed because the air pumped across the surface meant there was no friction, no resistance.

  No resistance…

  Alice smiled. It would be good if you could pump air across your brain to clear the ego’s resistance!

  She suddenly thought of Toby Collins’s approach in his sessions to resistance to change. Toby always said, “It’s pointless to fight it. Better to trick it.” And, in fact, he had developed some techniques—sometimes funny to put into practice—to help avoid resistance.

  Alice took a sip of champagne. What if she applied those techniques? Modern psychology in the service of spirituality. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? If personal development sometimes lacked spiritual depth, spirituality severely lacked the psychological tools to help people put it to use in their lives.

  She felt excited by that thought, and a few initial ideas came to mind. Cheered up, she poured herself some more champagne.

  “You look better!” said the wife of Paul’s colleague.

  Alice smiled at her and agreed.

  “It’s no fun—you always win,” said the older brother as he walked away. He flopped down in front of the television next to his younger brother.

  “Turn the sound down a little,” their mother said.

  The teenager at the air hockey table caught Alice’s eye. “Do you want to play?”

  “Play?” she replied, laughing. “I’ve never played air hockey!”

  “It’s easy, it’s like soccer.”

  “I’ve never played soccer either.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s no problem.”

  Alice hesitated a moment, then stood up. She took the paddle abandoned by the older brother and took her place across from the teenager. This was definitely more fun than listening to legal arguments.

  He started by giving the puck a little push in Alice’s direction, which she returned easily by giving it a little hit back. Seeing that she wasn’t doing too badly, he gradually speeded things up.

  Everything seemed a question of reflexes, of concentration, of getting all her faculties going so she could react in a fraction of a second. And yet Alice wasn’t concentrating, not at all. Quite the opposite—she was very relaxed. Her status as an inexperienced adult meant that nothing was expected of her, she had no score to defend, no reputation to uphold. She had nothing at all to lose. So she felt unusually free and calm, responding to every movement of the puck without thinking, without asking herself tactical questions, with simply a desire to do well. Her hand and arm reacted instinctively, and Alice almost had the impression of letting them act on their own, without trying to control them through her will.

  She scored a goal, which left her unmoved, and continued to let herself play without thinking about anything at all. She kept scoring goals, and the pace of the game grew faster and faster. She was in a different state, neither mentally invested nor emotionally involved in the
game but not a disinterested spectator either. She was aware of what she was doing, but at the same time, she enjoyed a feeling of letting go that was unusual for her. It was as if her movements were following a kind of physical intuition, as if her hand knew what to do without obeying any orders from her brain. And it happened like clockwork, with great fluidity of movement. In a game that was now going extremely fast, she kept scoring goals with no effort at all.

  The teenager declared the game was over and that Alice was the winner. She then realized he was dripping with sweat and hadn’t scored a single goal.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve been practicing for four months and none of my buddies has ever beaten me. You’re a pro, then, aren’t you?”

  “It’s the first time I’ve played.”

  “No way. Hey, Arthur. Did you see?”

  “Huh?” the brother replied without looking away from the television. He seemed glued to the sordid images on the news.

  “Forget it,” said the teenager. “Mom?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Did you see your friend? She can play incredibly fast.”

  “I’m getting embarrassed,” said Alice.

  “No, really, show her. It’s crazy. Look, Mom!”

  He picked up his paddle. Alice took hers, flattered by his words of praise. She was glad she’d come to the party after all!

  The game started up again with his mother watching.

  Proud to be the object of so much attention, Alice concentrated. The game resumed at maximum speed. She played as best she could, but she soon realized that the magic was gone, and despite an intense game, she lost to the teenager.

  “It’s true that she plays well,” his mother concluded.

  “She played much better just before. You missed it. It was crazy!”

  Alice thanked him and joined the adults.

  The television in the corner of the room continued broadcasting the news of the day in front of the dazed boys.

  Alice didn’t want any of the champagne or salmon canapés offered to her. She felt she was in some little cloud, thinking about what had just happened.

  It wasn’t an air hockey match. It had nothing to do with sports, competition, or even victory and defeat. It was something else. An awareness. An understanding.

  If she acted with confidence, without any egotistical motives or desire to serve her personal interests, those actions could be imbued with unbelievable, almost supernatural, power. It was as if she had been given a force over which she had no control, a power for which she was simply the medium. The wave that carried within it the strength of the ocean.

  Alice took a deep breath. She caught a glimpse of everything such a discovery could mean. What it could lead to in life.

  And she thought about Jesus again.

  He had insisted on healing the sick out of anyone’s sight and asked that no one spread the news of what he had done. Was it so that he wouldn’t lose his powers by allowing his ego to claim his achievements? Or was it to set an example, to show everyone that there was a link between the renunciation of pride and the power of our actions?

  She ran her fingers through her hair.

  At Hermès, she had succeeded in escaping from her ego for a few moments and had experienced an unbelievable feeling of well-being. During the hockey game, she had just glimpsed the power of actions that were devoid of ego. Alice was becoming more and more convinced that the “kingdom of heaven” Jesus constantly talked about had nothing to do with a paradise after death, with the end of time, or even with the coming of a supposed holy reign. And when his disciples—who never seemed to understand anything—asked him when they might see that divine kingdom, Jesus invariably replied that it would not come as an observable event, and that it had, in fact, already begun. It did not, therefore, have anything to do with a specific event or situation set in time.

  The kingdom—and she had felt this during her discussion with Raphaël Duvernet in the wine cellar of his château—must be that other reality she had perhaps experienced twice for a short time. A parallel reality to the one we all knew. One reality was temporal, the other spiritual. Day-to-day reality unfolded chronologically, every act taking place at a specific moment in time. Spiritual reality was…beyond time. It was like another dimension that was independent of this one. What’s more, during the first game, she’d lost all notion of time, as well as any concerns that related to time, like scoring a goal or winning. In the second game, after her ego was in the grip of success, she recalled thinking about scoring goals and winning. Her mind anticipated the future and hoped to emerge the winner. She had returned to the temporal plane.

  She smiled as she thought back to Jesus’s words, which she had initially perceived as bad advice: “Tomorrow will worry about itself.” She had revolted—how could someone advise others not to look ahead? She now understood that Jesus was barely concerned with the day-to-day realities of temporal life. His message had to do with another dimension into which he was inviting people.

  What if this was the “eternal life” he always had been promising—eternal because it was non-temporal? She vaguely recalled the statement that had particularly made her laugh, something like “Whoever hears my word will cross over from death to life.” You had to be so gullible, she’d thought at the time, to be taken in by such words, to believe that having died, you would wake up one day to have your body form again over your dried-out bones! Afterward, she had come to the idea that Jesus was perhaps using the term “death” to mean the egotistical existence. When we are controlled by our ego, we are so wide of the mark, we delude ourselves so much about who we are, that we don’t live our lives, and it’s as if we were dead. And according to Raphaël Duvernet, Eastern wisdom held that spiritual awakening required dying on a certain level to be reborn on another plane.

  Everything seemed linked. All these hypotheses, all these interpretations converged. Eternal life was not the heaven where you’d find all the nice dead people who had behaved well during their lives. Eternal life was that other reality Alice had caught a glimpse of, a reality that was immediately accessible to the living!

  “You look really strange, Alice. What on earth are you thinking about?”

  Alice started. It was Paul’s colleague.

  “Eternal life. What about you?”

  “Ha, ha! Great way to avoid the issue.” He lowered his voice to add, “You must be having sinful thoughts.”

  “Let’s just say no one would want to hear them.”

  He laughed and poured her more champagne. They clinked glasses.

  Things a lot of people wouldn’t be ready to hear, she thought. Things not easy to share.

  She sighed. It was probably best to keep it all to herself, to avoid making a fool of herself or being seen as crazy. How could anyone understand or imagine the possibility of another reality, a kind of parallel world outside of time, unless they had experienced it themselves, even if only for a few moments, as she’d had the unbelievable luck to do? Who could grasp what she had felt on those occasions?

  She sensed that very few people could hear such things and believe in them. Even a few months ago, she herself wouldn’t have taken it seriously.

  She thought back to her CEO, whose announcement of a humiliating general freeze in salaries had unleashed her instinct to apply the Christian precept of turning the other cheek. It had been the beginning of her adventure.

  She sighed again. Keeping it to herself was the wisest course. But at the same time, it was egotistical, wasn’t it?

  Ego-tistical.

  She bit her lip. “Impossible!” she said out loud, unable to hold back.

  “What?” asked the teenager.

  “Nothing.”

  She must act in such a way that everyone might benefit from this, that everyone might see that they could stop ruining their lives because of their egos! Everyone—starting with the people she could influence quickly, easily. The people from
—

  “What are you doing this weekend?” another colleague asked.

  “We haven’t planned anything,” Paul replied. “Perhaps we’ll have a walk around the Marais—”

  “No,” said Alice. “We’re going to Cluny this weekend!”

  Part III

  The hour has already come for you to wake up

  from your slumber…

  The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.

  So let us put aside the deeds of darkness

  and put on the armor of light.

  —Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 13:11–12

  21

  The old button-tufted leather door groaned on its hinges, then closed again with the muffled noise of a bellows. Entering the church, Alice smelled the familiar odor of damp stone lightly mixed with incense. Jeremy’s voice echoed in the nave as he ended Mass. In the semidarkness, she noticed for the first time a commemorative plaque at the foot of the statue of the Virgin Mary after its restoration a few years earlier. INAUGURATED IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS GRACE FRANÇOIS D’AUBIGNIER, BISHOP OF AUTUN. His name had been carefully engraved in the bronze for posterity.

  Alice silently walked up the side aisle. There were a respectable number of churchgoers, and she was happy for Jeremy. She recognized Madame de Sirdegault, sitting stiffly upright in her seat on the aisle of the first row, wearing the cross with the large ruby she always had on. Just behind her was Victor, the old winegrower who was half deaf, with Étienne, his friend who stuttered. On the other side of the central aisle sat Germaine and Cornélie, both wearing cat-eye glasses and holding a prayer book in one hand and rosary beads in the other.

  The altar was bathed in natural light, and Jeremy, in his black cassock and little white collar, stood out against the dark stone walls.